Goodnight noises
NIGHT NIGHT, I texted my daughter. “Goodnight stars, goodnight air, goodnight noises everywhere,” she replied as she has since she was three. If you recognise that then you and possibly your children/grandchildren were also captivated by Margaret Wise Brown’s book Goodnight Moon illustrated by Clement Hurd. Opening my wellworn copy I noticed that it is 70 years since its publication in 1947. It has sold about 48 million copies.
Not so much a story as an incantation, each page records the progress of a bunny in pyjamas settling down for sleep with the bedroom light slowly dimming: a perfect evocation of the small world of a small child where you might indeed say goodnight to your hairbrush.
It’s impossible to read it without feeling peaceful and sleepy. The hypnotic repetition lulls you into a deep sense of pleasurable security. It’s the bedtime we all, adults and children, crave. It’s the warm milky drink of children’s literature.
As is often the case with creators of sublime art, Margaret Wise Brown’s life was full of turmoil. Born in New York in 1910 she was glamorous and sassy, lived in an apartment in Greenwich Village and insisted on writing with a quill pen. Her lovers tended to be philanderers and alcoholics but she found happiness in the 1940s with Blanche Oelrichs (a poet better known as Michael Strange) who had been married to the actor John Barrymore. The women met in the home of a married man with whom they were both having an affair at the time. Margaret was heartbroken when Blanche died of leukaemia in 1950.
But her career as a successful children’s author was at its peak and she had reconciled herself to the fact that she seemed incapable of writing adult fiction. Her last loving relationship was with James Stillman Rockefeller, great-nephew of JD Rockefeller who was 16 years her junior. He asked her to marry him and the couple were to sail round the world. While making plans for this great adventure, Margaret died suddenly in 1952 of a blood clot. She was 42. As a writer she pioneered stories about what child psychologists were beginning to call the “here and now”, the life experiences of small children, rather than the moralising fables that were the stuff of classic children’s literature.
But there’s an odd postscript. She left the royalties for Goodnight Moon and most of her other books to Albert Clarke, the nine-year-old son of a neighbour, who bizarrely claims that Margaret – who had no children – is his biological mother. The money (a lot of money for Goodnight Moon is one of the most successful children’s books of all time) did him no good and he has led a life punctuated by drug abuse, ugly custody disputes, charges of affray and possession of weapons.
Goodnight Moon, an oasis of peace in a turbulent world, endures and is much loved. The irony is that if you buy a new copy the proceeds go straight into the pocket – if Clarke is still alive – of a chaotic petty criminal.